Dispatches from Mythikal Spiriticus — Entry 002
From the field journal of Tamsin Quill, Cartographer of Questionable Roads
The sensible thing to do when a silver-framed doorway appears in the back of a shop is to ask who put it there.
I asked the brass dragon knocker on the front door.
“Don’t know,” it said. “But I’d take a lantern.”
That was not the answer I wanted.
Behind me, the black ledger turned a page by itself. Gold letters formed across the paper:
SOME PLACES DISAPPEAR BECAUSE NO ONE CAN FIND THE WAY HOME.
My compass pointed through the darkness.
I took an antique-gold lantern from a nearby shelf, stepped over the threshold, and heard the door close with the soft click of a book being shut.
The lantern revealed a long room filled with maps. They hung from the ceiling, lay rolled in glass cases, and spilled across tables too large to have fit behind the shop. Some showed cities I knew. Others showed coastlines that moved whenever I blinked. A few were blank except for the words not yet.
At the far end of the room, a small map trembled beneath a glass weight. It showed a village called Hearthmere: seventeen cottages, a mill, a bridge, and one road leading west. As I watched, the road lifted from the parchment like a loose thread. The bridge faded. Then the mill.
I pulled the glass weight away.
“Careful,” said a voice above me.
A moon-moth descended from the rafters, its silver mail satchel nearly as large as its body. It dropped a letter into my hand.
To the cartographer who follows troublesome compasses: Hearthmere still exists. By moonrise, no one outside it will remember how to reach it. Find the stolen road before the village forgets itself.
There was no signature.
I looked back at the map. One cottage had vanished.
“How does someone steal a road?” I asked.
The moth folded its wings. “Usually while everyone is busy arguing about where it ought to go.”
From somewhere beyond the walls came three heavy knocks—the same sound I had heard beneath the shop floor. The maps stirred. Across the ceiling, an ink-black line began drawing itself toward Hearthmere.
I tried to follow it with my finger. The line split in two, then three. Every route ended at the Crossroads of Nine Lanterns.
The door behind me opened before I could touch it. I hurried back into Mythikal Sundries™, where the ledger had prepared another message:
ONE COMPASS. TWO COURAGEOUS FRIENDS. A BETTER HAT.
“Yes, I remember,” I told it.
The ledger underlined two.
Outside, the crossroads bustled as though no village were being rubbed from the world. The bakery’s windows glowed warm against the morning mist. Two goblins were still debating their cursed crown, though now each insisted the other had bought it.
I had until moonrise to find a road no one could see.
I also needed people willing to help, which might be the harder task.
The bakery door opened. Its owner stepped out carrying a tray of rolls and looked straight at my compass.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s pointing west again.”
I had never met her. She spoke as if she had been expecting me.
Behind us, the thirteenth bell rang once.
Next dispatch: “The Baker Who Remembered Hearthmere.”
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